Russell v. Shuster
Supreme Court of Pennsylvania
ERROR to the District Court for the city and county of Philadelphia. This was an action of trespass vi et armis, brought by Jacob Shuster against William Russell and Charles Downer. The declaration charged the defendants with arresting the plaintiff and taking him to the mayor’s office and imprisoning and keeping and detaining him in prison there, without any reasonable or probable cause, for four days, &c. The defendants pleaded not guilty with leave.
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ERROR to the District Court for the city and county of Philadelphia. This was an action of trespass vi et armis, brought by Jacob Shuster against William Russell and Charles Downer. The declaration charged the defendants with arresting the plaintiff and taking him to the mayor’s office and imprisoning and keeping and detaining him in prison there, without any reasonable or probable cause, for four days, &c. The defendants pleaded not guilty with leave. On the trial the plaintiff called the mayor of the city, who testified that the plaintiff, Shuster, alias Hand, was brought to his office by…
1Opinion of the Court
The opinion of the Court was delivered by
Gibson, C. J.
A constable may justify an arrest for reasonable cause of suspicion alone; and in this respect he stands on more favourable ground than a private person, who must show, in addition to such cause, that a felony was actually committed. The difficulty in regard to the first bill of exceptions before us, is to determine whether circumstances of suspicion which might have been pleaded in justification, as it is said the circumstances which would have been disclosed by the rejected evidence might have been, were competent to go to the jury under…
2Cited by7 opinions
- Commonwealth v. BosurgiSupreme Court of Pennsylvania · 1963
- Commonwealth v. RubinSuperior Court of Pennsylvania · 1923
- Palmer v. Maine Central RailroadSupreme Judicial Court of Maine · 1899
- Geary v. StevensonMassachusetts Supreme Judicial Court · 1897
- Billingsley v. Kline Cloak Co.Missouri Court of Appeals · 1917
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